Interpreting Freedom

...Boss and Binswanger especially welcomed Freud's clinical studies but refused to credit his theoretical model...

...Heidegger's Being and Time and Sartre's Being and Nothingness both demonstrate a negative notion of autonomy...

...The early years may sometimes "taint" later life, but they never determine it...

...Indeed, throughout he mirrors the existential misreadings of Freud, whose essential theme was the psychological rather than the biological, and whose focus was more on the mind than on the instincts...

...We live in culture and culture lives in us...

...As a result, the author falls victim to what he accuses Freudian theory of—reductionism...

...The ego was indeed fueled by instinctual energy and repressed the libido (hence Izenberg's emphasis on je//-repression), but it also stood at the juncture of individual and external reality...

...Although the existential analysts and philosophers—Ludwig Bins-wanger, Medard Boss, Heidegger and Sartre—did not approach Freud from quite the same angle as Izenberg, their criticism ultimately was similar...

...In the later Freud this is expressed in the famous dictum "where id was, there ego shall be...

...Izenberg maintains that he was mistaken in also attributing to it psychological phenomena like passivity, masochism, willing subordination, and the urge to self-destruction—that again his natural-scientific Weltanschauung worked against him...

...Freud's version of this theme was his belief that the instincts, conflicting in the short run, in the long run insure the survival of self and society...

...it is won in the face of great difficulty...

...But after the War ended a deep pessimism set in, and Freud undercut the basis for rationality by positing a biologically determined death drive, Thanatos...

...Therefore, behind these disparate philosophical and psychological projects was a shared problem—the end of a normative European culture...

...Thus the collapse of the rationalist tradition...

...the self is always opaque to itself, and we are not in complete control of our lives...

...It examines the former in light of the latter, and places both in an intellectual and cultural context...

...The two books reveal that absolute human values are often just escapes from an unwanted and terrifying freedom...

...The point is that Izenberg has read Freud too literally, without heeding the full range of his thought...

...Izenberg's sympathy is with the existentialists...

...Freud's answer—fixation at the Oedipal stage—is merely a description of the problem in different terms...

...Heidegger named it "inau-thenticity...

...Following his discussion of this critique, Izenberg enlarges the picture, locating Freud and the existentialists in the crisis of European thought brought to a head by World War I. Most prewar thinkers, according to the author, optimistically saw the mechanisms of life as rational, working for the greater good and the preservation of universal values...

...To begin with, in the account of Freud's effort at providing a scientific foundation for psychoanalysis, Izenberg erects a straw man...

...Dualistic instincts plus the conflict of self and world made any definition of sanity infinitely complicated and precarious...

...For all of its theoretical stumbling blocks, Freud's work is on the whole a richer and more satisfactory description of our "being-in-the world" than that of the existentialists...

...Yet significantly, he never published it, and, as Paul Ricoeur notes, his references to the work came less frequently and with more metaphorical intent over the years...

...In addition, where one might find the contradictions in Freud fruitful and suggestive—perhaps unavoidable—Izenberg considers them uniformly unfortunate and reduces Freud to his most positivistic...

...The result is generally impressive, a worthy accompaniment to Juliet Mitchell's recent work and earlier books by Philip Rieff, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, all of which, despite their psychoanalytical bias, helped embed the discussion within the history of ideas, where it properly belongs...

...Finally, Izenberg sets both psychoanalysis and existentialism against the background of European modernization...

...Surely this indicates Freud's awareness that not only are we in society, but society is in us...

...As a product of 19th-century positivism, the inventor of psychoanalysis reduced mind and motivation to unconscious prior neurological patterns...

...In welcome contrast, Gerald Izenberg's The Existentialist Critique of Freud offers a closely-reasoned study of psychoanalytic thought and existential psychiatry and philosophy...

...author, "The Party of Eros" Too often explorations of the historical and theoretical relationships between psychoanalysis and existentialism are little more than endless lists of names and dates put together in rather pointless attempts to determine who influenced whom and when...

...Why does a man marry a woman resembling his mother...

...And where did the characteristic "stance" Binswanger talked of originate...

...Sartre called it "bad faith...

...Why can the circuitry in the brain produced by a childhood fantasy or experience dominate the apparently reasoned choices of the adult...

...The existentialists did not fare much better, reaching an impasse in their own thought...

...Reading this book by one of their exponents, one cannot help feeling that for them, freedom became just another word for nothing left to lose...

...they are meaningful in themselves...

...He claims that Freud never synthesized his brilliant clinical observations with his meta-psychology derived from the natural sciences...

...They did not deny the importance of sexuality or that people were frequently unaware of what motivated their actions...

...Because the existentialists refuse to acknowledge these conditions they will remain shrewd, insightful and sharply limited psychologists...

...Izenberg's contention that Freud proposed a solely biological basis for reason (and mental health) can be attacked, too...

...The uncomplimentary Freudian view of the father reflected the disintegrating family structure and weakening power of patriarchal tradition...

...The adult's attitudes are therefore not reenactments of childhood experience...

...This culminated in a different view of behavior...

...Grounded in neo-Idealism, the Verstehen tradition of social thought and Husserl's phenomenology, the two held that a patient's experience of the world was not reducible to previous, causal forces like the libido or explicable by reference to the impersonal "entity" known as the unconscious...

...The author's reading of Freud, though, is not without serious flaws...

...Where Freud, for example, said that anal eroticism led to the retention of feces and, in turn, to the hoarding of money, Binswanger contended that all three phenomena simultaneously express an underlying "stance" toward the world: emptying and filling...

...In fact, Freud explicitly stated that the metapsychology could be replaced without any real damage to the fledgling discipline...

...True, Freud sketched out a neurological model of mental operations in his Project (1895...

...Yet Freud by his own admission was unable to explain fixation...

...The author is equally unjust when stating that the early psychoanalysis attributed all influence to the instincts and almost none to the repressive effects of social forces...

...In Freud, autonomy is not freely granted...

...In what sense does an infant "choose...

...For while not always consistent, the psychoanalyst's thrust was against any kind of ethic based on naturalism...

...Izenberg seems unaware, too, that the existentialists' refusal to offer causal explanations renders their notion of freedom abstract and empty, and lends their writing a moralistic tone...

...The existentialists' prescriptions before the dreaded freedom and their search for identity were analogous answers to a rootless society, a world "without the fathers...

...They did reject, however, the privileged explanatory position of the libido and the unconscious, or any theory that deprived individuals of autonomy...

...Reviewed by Richard H.King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College...